Odessa
Genius and Death in a City of Dreams
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of a National Jewish Book Award
"Fascinating.…A humane and tragic survey of a great and tragic subject." —Jan Morris, Literary Review
From Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist renegade Vladimir Jabotinsky and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, an astonishing cast of geniuses helped shape Odessa, a legendary haven of cosmopolitan freedom on the Black Sea. Drawing on a wealth of original sources and offering the first detailed account of the destruction of the city's Jewish community during the Second World War, Charles King's Odessa is both history and elegy—a vivid chronicle of a multicultural city and its remarkable resilience over the past two centuries.
Customer Reviews
Disappointing
I expected a book about a city. What I got was the Jewish history of Odessa. While that might be an interesting book, it wasn't what I expected, and wasn't what I wanted to read about. Furthermore, the book as a whole isn't very coherent; there's no clear theme organizing the story, and it makes it hard to really get a feeling for Odessa. Too bad.